You have just been informed that aliens are coming. They will take over the Earth in 60 minutes. You are the only person on the planet who knows this information. You must tell the Prime Minister. But you must tell them in a way that means that they actually take some action. What do you … Continue reading The aliens are coming!
Category: Themes
"So what's the difference between IT and Digital?" That's a heck of a googly to receive at the end of a 90 minutes workshop. (For American readers, a googly in cricket is what a curveball is in baseball, but we Brits don't play baseball. We play rounders. When we are seven.) Anyway, an interesting question, … Continue reading IT vs Digital
The world of homeopathy is an interesting thing. Pseudoscience cobbled together to produce medical interventions that are no more effective than a placebo, but have some sort of efficacy as a result of that effect. If you want to create a placebo effect, then you need to tell people a story to get them to … Continue reading Homeopathic IT
On Friday I was at a presentation given by one of the big IT vendors on the subject of Big Data and analytics. During the session the story was told of how US retailer Target had got so good with predictive analytics that they had infuriated the father of a teenage girl by sending her … Continue reading The legends of Big Data
I learned this week of the term Madtech. Marketing and advertising technology. It's good to see that cobbler's child syndrome is alive and well in the world; they might as well call it Sales, Hustling, Interrupting and Tracking Tech. Thing is, for all the talk about how smart marketing is becoming, driven by big data … Continue reading Retargeted
In a few weeks' time I'm running a short workshop for a group of people who work in the world of marketing insight. In preparation, I'm looking to find a few volunteers who can help me test a theory... I'm someone who has a lot of theories. I try to test as many of them … Continue reading Surveyed
Last week I wrote about the pioneering work of the Tavistock Institute and the thinking that they provided into dealing with a world of cloud-like problems. That terminology was taken from philosopher Karl Popper's beautiful analogy of a world in which some problems are clock-like (complex, complicated, but ultimately knowable) but many of the real … Continue reading Dealing with Clouds
The dust isn't yet settled on the UK's General Election, but one element that is already getting coverage is the gap between opinion polling before the ballot, the exit poll, and what appears to be the final outcome. After weeks of pollsters predicting a result "too close to call", the exit poll published when the … Continue reading Sampling
I seem to hear the phrase Culture Change a fair bit at the moment. Increasingly I'm coming to the conclusion as it's used as a shorthand for "people change we don't know how or can't be bothered to address". Changing people's behaviours is hard. But changing culture is even harder. To be honest, I'm coming to … Continue reading Hiding behind culture
The coal mining industry of post-Second World War Britain might not be the most obvious of places to seek ideas for how to address contemporary issues of digital transformation but, hey, go with me. The coal industry in the 1940s had barely changed since the turn of the century. Although coal was a primary source … Continue reading Down Pit
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